Paczki and Sympathy
They say you can't judge a book by its cover and so is the case with Maria Slabodnik Sielewicz.I always knew Maria as a refined, lovely woman with a Polish accent who was a church friend of my mother. When mom passed away, Maria called to say she wanted to bring over some of her homemade paczki, also known as Polish bismarcks or doughnuts.
As we drank coffee and ate paczki, we reminisced about our respective mothers. And, then, Maria told me the most remarkable things.
Hard Labor Camp
In 1943, at the age of 11, she and her mother, Magdalena Slabodnik, were force marched from their Polish town of Wilno to a German concentration camp. Her father was appropriated as a driver and, eventually, died of untreated frostbite and gangrene. Her two brothers, also, were casualties of war."We were taken to a former German prison, in the middle of nowhere. It was a huge brick building but there were no ovens there. The conditions were terrible -- lice, bed bugs. We had no calendar. We didn't even know when Easter was (an important Roman Catholic holiday). We worked from sunrise to sunset in the fields planting or harvesting," Maria says.
It was the children's job, she says, to hold a basket over one arm and stoop over to plant or harvest with the other arm. Their one meal of the day, a thin soup, was brought to the fields midday. Supper was nonexistent. Each person received one small hard brick of bread per week. If it was voraciously eaten in one meal, there was no more for the rest of the week.
"During the winter, we were sent to a factory where we separated the good beans from the wormy beans. The worm-infested ones went into our soup. It was the only meat we got," she says.
Labor Takes Its Toll on Developing Bones
After two years of planting and harvesting with a heavy basket on her left arm, Maria says it atrophied, turned black and she lost all sensation. She was taken to a hospital where she overheard doctors talking about amputation."I escaped and made my way back to the camp and found my mother. As the Germans retreated from the American forces, we were moved from location to location, until we were liberated," she says.
"At a displaced persons camp near Berlin, I met another former prisoner who was an intern and said he knew how to treat my arm but that it required an expensive machine that German doctors were willing to sell or barter for," she says.
By that point, Maria says, monthly care packages were arriving from the United States. They contained two packs of cigarettes, a Hershey bar, peanut butter, condensed milk and a small bag of coffee.
"Everyone in the camp saved their cigarettes so we could barter with the doctors for the machine," Maria says.
This mystery machine was some type of electric nerve stimulator that she says brought her arm back to life. Life went on in the displaced persons camp where Maria attended high school taught by Polish teachers without the benefit of papers or pencils.
The American Dream
In 1949, at the age of 17, Maria and her mother found sponsorship from a family in Des Moines, Iowa, and made their way to America, landing first in Boston."There were no Poles in Des Moines at the time," Maria says. "And I didn't speak a word of English. The first thing I asked for was a Polish-English dictionary, which I still have to this day. Then I begged the nuns at a Catholic girls high school to teach me English. In a year's time, I was able to attend the school and graduated a year later."
After successful jobs as a switchboard operator and remittance clerk, Maria met her future husband, Vince Sielewicz, at a party and, she says, it was instant, mutual attraction.
The couple eventually moved to Northwest Indiana with Maria's mother (who died in 1977) where they settled and raised their two children. Today, Maria still makes her own sauerkraut, pierogi and is known at her parish church as a paczki maker extraordinaire.
Despite experiences that would have soured others on life, Maria maintains a positive attitude and, at 77, is still anxious to learn new things. She can find her way around the Internet with ease, and makes no bones about showing off her great-granddaughter's pictures on the computer.
"Family," Maria says, "is the most important thing."
